Conspiracy Theory(28)

“Oh.”

Linda Melajian was coming back with their breakfasts. Gregor’s took up two-thirds of the tray. John and Bennis each had a small round plate with a pear in the middle of it. The pears were stuffed with Danish blue cheese. Bennis stared at hers and went back to her coffee.

“Well,” John said. “There’s no use worrying about it now. Let me look into this stuff. Then I’ll get back to you. And don’t the two of you forget. You’re going out to Bryn Mawr to talk to Frank Margiotti. I don’t care if you talk to the FBI or not.”





TWO



1


Lucinda Watkins had been working with Anne Ross Wyler for six years, and never once in all that time had she been able to forget the differences between them. It was not, at all, the way she had expected that to be. Annie didn’t sound Upper Class, the way that fool William F. Buckley did on that television program Lucinda had once found as fascinating as a disaster area. Annie didn’t use a lot of big words or dress up no matter what the time of day or night, either. It was usually Lucinda who ended up fussing about clothes, because Annie quite literally didn’t notice what she wore. She was more than capable of going into the living room to meet a reporter dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt that said Bite the Wa x Tadpole in big red letters. The worst was when she had shown up at a Congressional hearing on child pornography wearing a T-shirt that said Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican, and Lucinda had only had forty-five seconds to exchange blouses with her so that she didn’t end up alienating the entire United States House of Representatives. Later, Annie had lectured her endlessly on the fact that the entire United States House of Representatives was not Republican, but Lu-cinda had stuck to her guns that time, and with good reason. They were in enough trouble, on a day-to-day basis, without offending Newt Gingrich.

Where Lucinda saw the difference, and couldn’t avoid it, was in things. Annie did not have a lot of things, and she didn’t seem to care about having “nice” ones, but what she had she was entirely indifferent to. Lucinda couldn’t break a plate or stain a tablecloth without experiencing deep feelings of guilt and panic: guilt because she had ruined something that she had had the responsibility of taking care of; panic because such an accident almost always meant an expenditure that would be difficult to make and injurious to the family budget. She could still remember her grandmother sitting down at the kitchen table working out the figures with pen and paper. So much out of the grocery money; so much out of the bus money; so much out of the money put aside each week to buy the papers: all this, just to get enough together to replace a toaster or a dress that was supposed to last the whole school year but that Lucinda had ripped on the playground the very first day. Life was counting, addition and subtraction, rigidity. A broken milk pitcher was a week with two days of greens, no meat. A ruined pair of shoes was a month without snack money for school and the two meatless days a week on top of it. The only money that never got cut was the money for books. Grandma Watkins insisted on buying them all a book a month, a real one, not from the racks at the drugstore but from the one bookstore in Jacksonville that the owner wouldn’t look down on her in. That had been a ritual as solemn and unbending as the rituals of the Catholic Church, which they did not belong to because the Catholics did not praise the Lord with enough joy, and because it was bad enough being poor in Mississippi without being Catholic on top of it. Lucinda had never, in all her life, ruined a book, and she couldn’t imagine herself doing it. Even the ruin of really bad books made her ill. She had tried and failed to join the Progressive Conference of Philadelphia, because at her first meeting a man had stood up and ripped apart a copy of The Bell Curve. Once, finding a copy of A Wake Up Call for the White Race getting rained on on the ground just next to a bus shelter, she had picked it up and wiped it off and put it in a dry, although suitably out of the way, place. It was not that she did not understand the power of hate, but that she felt the power of books more strongly, and the power of the need to preserve all things and waste nothing, against the day when you had nothing at all.

Annie’s basic attitude to things was not to notice they were there. If they broke, and she had to notice them, she got annoyed at them and threw them away. Then she went out and bought another of whatever it was. Lucinda had known, from the beginning, that Annie was rich, but this approach to possessions had startled her from the beginning, and still did. It was bad enough when Annie swept away a load of broken crockery that had been smashed on the dining room floor—the girls, when they came to stay, were often angry; they screamed; they ranted; they broke things—and drove down to Price Heaven to buy three or four more sets of dinner plates or coffee mugs. At times like those, Lucinda could tell herself that she was being neurotic. A rich woman like Annie didn’t have to worry about the price of a few cheap plates. When it came to the cameras, Lucinda could not convince herself so easily that she was the one who was crazy. Cameras cost money. The cameras Annie bought cost hundreds of dollars, in one case over a thousand, because they were equipped to take night shots without an ordinary flash, to take shots at odd angles, to do all kinds of things that an ordinary off-the-shelf camera couldn’t do. Annie was no more careful about the cameras, or worried about their breaking, than she was about the plates. At least twice a month, she came back with one of the cameras smashed. The johns hated being photographed. If they thought they could get away with it, they leaped out of their cars and chased her. Sometimes it was the cops who took the cameras and ruined them. “Never underestimate the power of a cop on the take,” Annie always said, and Lucinda had come to understand that this was true. Lord only knew, Annie was right to say that the wholesale prostitution of twelve-and fourteen-year-olds would not continue to thrive if somebody wasn’t looking the other way.